Martin Mosebach: Catholic Art Shows Eyeless Dolls

The Church was wrong to see "no danger in secularised art", writes the German writer Martin Mosebach (Communio, June 2024).

According to Mosebach, after the so-called "Enlightenment", artists refused to be instructed on how to paint sacred art and refused to follow the tradition of sacred art. They "embraced a theology that dissolved the Gospel into the abstract-philosophical or secular-political".

This art was in keeping with a "Church that was moving ever closer to the areligious zeitgeist". In the meantime, even the cross has become "too intrusive" for many artists [and clerics] and "smells too eerily of blood and sacrifice".

Mosebach points to the main problem: the clergy no longer know how to relate to Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity.

If many bishops and priests do not know how to deal with the tradition of the Church, especially with the will of early Christianity to pass on an authentic image of Jesus, "how can one expect anything else from artists but weakly sketched corpses or eyeless dolls mounted in front of crosses?"

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